Alice Munro - Writing Her Lives

When she returned to Huron County, she began the imaginative and textual progression that proved the great fact of her career. Back in Ontario, she moved from “Home” to “Places at Home” to
Who Do You Think You Are?
to
The Beggar Maid
toward
The Moons of Jupiter
. Returning home, she became Alice Munro. 43

PART THREE
Being Alice Munro
Feeling Like Rilke’s Editor
Making
The Moons of Jupiter, The Progress of Love, Friend of My Youth,
1980–1990
    Connection. That was what it was all about. The cousins were a show in themselves, but they also provided a connection. A connection with the real, and prodigal, and dangerous, world. They knew how to get on in it, they had made it take notice.
– “Chaddeleys and Flemings: 1. Connection”
    What are those times that stand out, clear patches in your life – what do they have to do with it? They aren’t exactly promises. Breathing spaces. Is that all?
– “Circle of Prayer”
    All this acceptance comes as rather a shock to someone so well schooled in surviving without it.
– Alice Munro, 1986

I n September 1980 Douglas Gibson wrote to Munro, who was then in Australia as a visiting writer at the University of Queensland. “Brisbane, for crying out loud,” he wrote, “well, stone the bleeding crows, as your students no doubt say.… Ginger delighted me by mentioning the five stories just sold to the New Yorker [and] the exciting idea of a book fictionally based around your parents.” This letter’s real significance lay in Gibson’s subsequent words: “But keep in mind the assurance that I gave you some years ago. I’m not going to pester you to write novels. I’m perfectly pleased to go on publishing collections of Alice Munro stories – related or unrelated – as long as you keep writing them.” This assurance, first offered to Munro when he began wooing her to Macmillan, is one he has maintained throughout their relationship.
    Replying from Australia with a jovial apology – “Didn’t I tell you I was going into exile?” – Munro reported that she did “have enough stories for a book now,” and that she was working on the first draft of something that might prove “a more held-together piece of work (I avoid saying ‘novel’).” This may well have been what an Australian journalist described a few months later as “a novel tracing three generations of women”; it evolved, probably, into “The Progress of Love.” In addition to the
New Yorker
stories, she also mentioned “a long Memoir I wrote about my father, which I think is pretty good, but I think it should be kept out for a kind of family book I want to do someday – maybe about the Laidlaws in Huron County and in Ettrick and James Hogg whose mother was a Laidlaw.” Munro has indeed gone on to write about the Laidlaws in Huron County, in “Working for a Living,” the piece mentioned here, “Changing Places,” and “A Wilderness Station,” and she has written about James Hogg and the Laidlaws in Ettrick in “Changing Places” too. So while she was writing Gibson from Australia, Alice Munro’s imagination in September 1980 was focused on home.
    The kind of “family book” she described here, as it turned out, waited another twenty-five years and saw Munro publish seven more new collections before it appeared in 2006 as
The View from Castle Rock
, a hybrid of family history, fiction, memoir, and closely made autobiographical stories. So long a preliminary, involving such deep and considered rumination, enhances the longstanding presence of“Home,” “Everything Here Is Touchable and Mysterious,” “Working for a Living,” and “Changing Places,” among others, within Munro’s work. Her return brought on an enriched awareness of her home, its culture, and her relation to it. Examples of this process are evident throughout her writing then. Between the first appearance of “Royal Beatings” in the
New Yorker
, for instance, and its inclusion in
Who Do You Think You Are?
Munro revised her description of West Hanratty and its relation to Hanratty so that it is much expanded into the long paragraph ending “and a cloudy, interesting, problematical light on the world.” That paragraph begins,
    They lived in a poor part of town. There was Hanratty and West Hanratty, with the river flowing between them. This was West Hanratty. In Hanratty the social structure ran from doctors and dentists and lawyers down to foundry workers and factory workers and draymen; in